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OK, here's the second post in the "How to use ActiveState software in strange ways" vein. I'm writing this post in Komodo. Not that surprising given where I work, but it's interesting how I got from my web-based blog interface to a Komodo buffer.

About.com has proclaimed that "Komodo Edit is hands down the best free XML editor available." That's pretty cool, considering XML editing is one area we don't heavily talk about. There are a lot of features that slide under the radar when you don't dig a little deeper. One is that we support RelaxNG schema's and DTD files for adding autocompletion of XML dialects we don't support out-of-box.

I'll resist the temptation to continue with a bunch of double-entendres. The Wine I'm talking about is the open source Windows emulator, and the crazy thing is using it to run PerlApp to make Windows executables on Linux.

Before I continue though, I have to add: Using ActiveState products under Wine is not supported. Please don't email ActiveState support asking for help with this, because it's not guaranteed to work. Your mileage may will vary.

Ooh, Monday morning starts off with a bad pun! Would you forgive me if I told you that cheap joke was to get your attention as we announce the release of Tcl Dev Kit 5.0? I thought you might....

It's true, no joke: TDK 5.0 has just been released. Easier, smarter, and more flexible: TDK 5.0 is an essential upgrade for Tcl/Tk developers, with TclApp cross-platform wrapping, multi-architecture starkits, improved TDK Checker syntax analysis, and support for Tcl 8.6.

We are proud to announce that we have become part of the advisory board for the Parrot Foundation. The Parrot Foundation is a membership-based non-profit organization, providing technical, legal, and organizational infrastructure for the Parrot open source software project.

Yessiree, the moment you've all been waiting for: Komodo IDE 5.0 is now in beta!

The beta phase is an opportunity for the Komodo community to help ActiveState test new functionality, identify bugs, and enhance the quality of the upcoming release. If you're up for the challenge, go check out the new features:

You know how you're supposed to add the height and width attributes to an img tag? I know, I know, this is the sort of thing we're supposed to use computers for. After all, it's tedious to look up that information, and it makes your HTML more brittle, since when you change the image the rest of the tag also goes out of date. This is so first-normal-form, and yet apparently some people still hit the web via dial-up.

Every now and again I spend a weekend day working needlessly on something I shouldn't. Today that was the SD Connector. SD Connector (released under MPL/GPL/LGPL) is an extension that works in Komodo and Firefox, providing a way to write simple socket services, both server side and client side. The sample services include an echo server, a simple JavaScript shell (accessible via telnet) and a JSON rpc server. They are in varying states of readiness, largely in